Last week Geri Halliwell and Chris Evans, London mayoral candidate Frank Dobson, and Helen Fielding, who has just published a sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary, got in the papers, but the publicity hat trick was scored by the man who put them there. Matthew Freud, the founder of Freud Communications, has himself become an object of public interest, in both his public and private life. From its beginnings in 1984 in his flat on the outskirts of Notting Hill, Freud Communications, representing entertainment celebrities and corporations, has grown into a firm with a pounds 12m annual turnover. Five years ago Freud, who now lives in the heart of that swish district, sold it to the advertising agency Abbott Mead Vickers for a sum that has been reported as two, five and 10 million pounds. "They're all inaccurate," he says, "but the last one is the closest.

The real figure is a bit more." Freud is, one reporter says, "a very shrewd and clever networker" and, in the intertwined development of his social and commercial life, has created a brilliant closed circuit. He lives with Elisabeth Murdoch, daughter of Rupert, who runs BSkyB, which Freud represented. Freud's company arranged the premiere of the movie Notting Hill, written and produced by Richard Curtis, who lives with Freud's actress sister, Emma. Curtis's house, (whose blue front door, in a stunning example of product placement, was used as Hugh Grant's in the film), was bought by Freud's estranged wife, Caroline. (She is now involved with a very non-Notting Hill type, Earl Spencer.) And perhaps the most famous recent Notting Hill resident, Peter Mandelson, is a close friend of Freud, responsible for the publicist's cosiness with the Labour Party, including membership of the board of the Millennium Dome.As an even better-known PR man, Max Clifford, puts it: "Mandelson is possibly the second most influential person in this country because he has the ear of Tony Blair. So if it's known you are close to Mandelson, you are going to be successful." But Freud has a lot more than famous friends to recommend him.

"He knows how to talk to newspaper people in their own language," says Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror. "He has a very sharp mind, he's got style, and he makes me laugh. He's equally adept at getting stories into the paper and keeping them out - if he wants something out, he'll offer you something better. He talks like a businessman - everything's a deal."Persons not given to the perpetual optimism of the PR man might see in the career of the 35-year-old Freud the gloomy decline of late-20th-century ideals. Whereas his great-grandfather Sigmund sought to bring people truth, his father Clement, the chef and former Liberal MP, wanted to improve them, and his uncle, the great portraitist Lucian, transformed them into art, Matthew Freud...